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By NASA
Students prepare their robots to enter Artemis Arena during NASA’s Lunabotics competition on May 20, 2025, at the Center for Space Education near the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. NASA/Isaac Watson As college students across the country embark upon the academic year, NASA is giving them something else to look forward to – the agency’s 2026 Lunabotics Challenge. Teams interested in participating can submit their applications and supporting materials through NASA’s Stem Gateway portal beginning Monday, Sept. 8.
Key dates and challenge details are available in the 2026 Lunabotics Challenge Guidebook. Once all applications and supporting materials are received and evaluated, NASA will notify the selected teams to begin the challenge.
Student teams participating in this year’s challenge will create robots capable of building berms out of lunar regolith – the loose, fragmental material on the Moon’s surface. Structures like these will be important during lunar missions as blast protection during lunar landings and launches, shading for cryogenic propellant tank farms, radiation shielding around nuclear power plants, and other uses critical to future Moon missions.
“We are excited to continue the Lunabotics competition for universities as NASA develops new Moon to Mars technologies for the Artemis program,” said Robert Mueller, senior technologist at NASA, as well as co-founder and chief judge of the Lunabotics competition. “Excavating and moving regolith is a fundamental need to build infrastructure on the Moon and Mars and this competition creates 21st century skills in the future workforce.”
An in-person qualifying event will be held May 12-17, 2026, at the University of Central Florida’s Space Institute’s Exolith Lab in Orlando. From this round, the top 10 teams will be invited to bring their robots to the final competition on May 19-21, at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex’s Artemis Arena in Florida, which has an area filled with a lunar regolith simulant. The team scoring the most points will receive the Lunabotics Grand Prize and participate in an exhibition-style event at NASA Kennedy.
By encouraging innovative construction techniques and assessing student designs and data the same way it does its own prototypes, NASA casts a wider net to find innovative solutions to challenges inherent in future Artemis missions, like developing future lunar excavators, in-situ resource utilization capabilities, and living on the Moon or Mars. With its multidisciplinary approach, Lunabotics also serves as a workforce pipeline, with teams gaining valuable hands-on experience in computer coding, engineering, manufacturing, fabricating, and other crucial skills, while also receiving technical expertise in space technology development.
NASA’s Lunabotics Challenge, held annually since 2010, is one of several Artemis Student Challenges. The two-semester competition provides U.S. college and technical school teams an opportunity to design, build, and operate a prototype lunar robot using NASA systems engineering processes. Competitions help NASA get innovative design and operational data, reduce risks, and cultivate new ideas needed to return to the Moon under the Artemis campaign to prepare for human exploration of Mars.
To learn more about Lunabotics, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/learning-resources/lunabotics-challenge/
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By NASA
This competition provides a hands-on opportunity for participants to gain critical skills in engineering, computing, electronics, and more that will be required for America’s technical workforce. If you are in sixth to 12th-grade at a U.S. public, private, or charter school – including those in U.S. territories – your challenge is to team up with your schoolmates and develop a science or technology experiment idea for one of the following NASA TechRise flight vehicles:
Suborbital-Spaceship with approximately 3 minutes of microgravity. High-Altitude Balloon with approximately 4 to 8 hours of flight time at 70,000 to 95,000 feet and exposure to Earth’s atmosphere, high-altitude radiation, and perspective views of our planet. Award: $1,500 each to 60 winning teams
Open Date: September 4, 2025
Close Date: November 3, 2025
For more information, visit: https://www.futureengineers.org/nasatechrise
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By NASA
The next era of lunar exploration demands a new kind of wheel – one that can sprint across razor-sharp regolith, shrug off extremely cold nights, and keep a rover rolling day after lunar day. The Rock and Roll with NASA Challenge seeks that breakthrough. If you can imagine a lightweight, compliant wheel that stays tough at higher speeds while carrying lots of cargo, your ideas could set the pace for surface missions to follow. For this phased Challenge, Phase 1 rewards the best concepts and analyses, Phase 2 funds prototypes, and Phase 3 puts the best wheels through a live obstacle course simulating the lunar terrain. Along the way, you’ll receive feedback from NASA mobility engineers and the chance to see your hardware pushed to its limits. In Phase 3, to prove concepts, NASA is using MicroChariot, a nimble, 45 kg test rover that will test the best designs from Phase 1 & Phase 2 at the Johnson Space Center Rockyard in Houston, Texas. Whether you’re a student team, a garage inventor, or a seasoned aerospace firm, this is your opportunity to rewrite the playbook of planetary mobility and leave tread marks on the future of exploration. Follow the challenge, assemble your crew, and roll out a solution that takes humanity back to the Moon.
Award: $155,000 in total prizes
Open Date: Phase 1 – August 28, 2025; Phase 2 – January 2026; Phase 3 – May 2026
Close Date: Phase 1 – November 4, 2025; Phase 2 – April 2026; Phase 3 – June 2026
For more information, visit: https://www.herox.com/NASARockandRoll
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By NASA
NASA’s Human Lander Challenge (HuLC) is an initiative supporting its Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate’s (ESDMD’s) efforts to explore innovative solutions for a variety of known technology development areas for human landing systems (HLS). Landers are used to safely ferry astronauts to and from the lunar surface as part of the mission architecture for NASA’s Artemis campaign. Through this challenge, college students contribute to the advancement of HLS technologies, concepts, and approaches. Improvements in these technology areas have the potential to revolutionize NASA’s approach to space exploration, and contributions from the academic community are a valuable part of the journey to discovery. HuLC is open to teams comprised of full-time or part-time undergraduate and/or graduate students at an accredited U.S.-based community college, college, or university. HuLC projects allow students to incorporate their coursework into real aerospace design concepts and work together in a team environment. Interdisciplinary teams are encouraged.
Award: $126,000 in total prizes
Open Date: August 29, 2025
Close Date: March 4, 2026
For more information, visit: https://hulc.nianet.org/
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By NASA
3 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
NASA is kicking off the 2026 Student Launch challenge, looking for new student teams to design, build, and launch high-powered rockets with a scientific or engineering payload next April.
The agency is seeking proposals until Monday, Sept. 22. Details about this year’s challenge are in the 2026 handbook, which outlines the requirements for middle school, high school, and college students to participate. After a competitive proposal selection process, selected teams must meet documentation milestones and undergo detailed reviews throughout the activity year.
NASA’s Student Launch, a STEM competition, officially kicks off its 26th anniversary with the 2026 handbook. “These bright students rise to a nine-month challenge for Student Launch that tests their skills in engineering, design, and teamwork,” said Kevin McGhaw, director of NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement Southeast Region. “They are part of the Golden Age of explorers – the future scientists, engineers, and innovators who will lead us into the future of space exploration.”
Student Launch will culminate with on-site events starting on April 22, 2026. Final launches are scheduled for April 25, at Bragg Farms in Toney, Alabama, near NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Each year, NASA updates the university payload challenge to reflect current scientific and exploration missions. For the 2026 season, the payload challenge will take inspiration from the Artemis missions, which seek to explore the Moon for scientific discovery, technology advancement, and to learn how to live and work on another world as we prepare for human missions to Mars. This year’s payload challenge tasks college and university teams with designing, building, and flying a habitat to safely house four STEMnauts – non-living objects representing astronauts – during extended missions. The habitat must include equipment capable of both collecting and testing soil samples to support agricultural research operations.
Nearly 1,000 students participated in the 2025 Student Launch competition – making up 71 teams from across the United States. Teams launched their rockets to an altitude between 4,000 and 6,000 feet, while attempting to make a successful landing and executing the payload mission.
NASA Student Launch has been at the forefront of experiential education, providing students from middle school through university with unparalleled opportunities to engage in real-world engineering and scientific research.
John Eckhart
Technical Coordinator, Student Launch
Former NASA Marshall Director Art Stephenson started Student Launch in 2000 as a student rocket competition at the center. Just two university teams competed in the inaugural challenge – Alabama A&M University and the University of Alabama in Huntsville. The challenge continues to soar with thousands of students participating in the STEM competition each year, and many going on to a career with NASA.
NASA Marshall’s Office of STEM Engagement hosts Student Launch to provide students with real-world experiences that encourage them to pursue degrees and careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Student Launch is one of several NASA Artemis Student Challenges – a variety of activities that expose students to the knowledge and technology required to achieve the goals of the agency’s Artemis campaign.
In addition to NASA Office of STEM Engagement’s Next Generation STEM project, NASA Space Operations Mission Directorate, Northrop Grumman, National Space Club Huntsville, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, National Association of Rocketry, Relativity Space and, Bastion Technologies provide funding and leadership for the Student Launch competition.
To learn more about Student Launch, visit:
www.nasa.gov/studentlaunch
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Last Updated Aug 25, 2025 Related Terms
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